The development projects in the city have given rise to a new form of tax evasion by the owners of non-transport construction equipment engaged at these project sites in large numbers.
In the last two months alone, the Motor Vehicles Department (MVD) had seized three roadrollers, one concrete mixer and a forklift truck.
Unlike the sale of normal vehicles, the dealers of which are under its watch, the department was not able to trace the equipment since their dealers were mostly based outside the State.
“Most of these equipment were either imported or assembled using imported components and were bought mostly from places such as Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad,” said George Thomas, Motor Vehicle Inspector with the Ernakulam Regional Transport Office.
Buyers from Kerala chose not to register them since that entailed life tax at the rate of 6 per cent. Considering that they were costly equipment with price upwards of Rs.25 lakh to Rs.1 crore, the tax amount runs into lakhs. Another ploy adopted was to get them registered in other States, especially the northeastern States, at negligible tax.
The equipment hardly come under the scanner of the routine enforcement squads of MVD either, since they are rarely deployed on roads but are directly unloaded at worksites and hence need specific tip-offs.
The owner of one such roadroller seized from the Infopark construction site was made to cough up life tax to the tune of Rs.1.64 lakh while another found engaged in national highways work at Kalamassery was made to pay Rs.1.76 lakh and payment was due on another roadroller from Alappuzha.
A concrete mixer brought from Tamil Nadu was released on the payment of Rs.15,000 towards a year’s tax on producing documents that it was deployed by the manufacturer as demo for a potential customer.
A forklift engaged by a Thripunithura-based company for container movement insider a facility at Vallarpadam International Container Transhipment Terminal was asked to pay tax in excess of Rs.2 lakh on which the owner approached the court with the plea that tax should be fixed based on weight.
